Craig King aims to bring healthy food to underserved populations

By Cindy Sutter Camera Staff Writer

Posted:
09/04/2009 03:22:17 PM MDT

Updated:
09/05/2009 11:57:32 AM MDT

If you're shopping at Boulder's Whole Foods Markets Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, you might be doing more than picking up fair trade coffee or organic chicken breasts. You might spend part of your visit watching a movie.

A film, "Here We Grow," by a former Boulder personal chef and now documentarian, Craig King, will be shown on a computer monitor at a demonstration table where the movie will be offered for sale. There, shoppers will also be able to sample Good Belly probiotic juice drink, made by Boulder-based NextFoods, co-founded by Steve Demos, one of several Boulder residents who appear in the film. The movie will be sold at Whole Foods Markets nationwide and will premiere in New York at Tribeca Cinemas on Sept. 30.

"Here We Grow" is the latest in the burgeoning food horror genre that includes films such as this year's "Food, Inc." and 2004's "Super Size Me," as well as the books, "Fast Food Nation" and "The Omnivore's Dilemma." These documentaries and books take a critical look at America's industrial farms and corporate food processors and their effects on the nation's health and waistlines, as well as the deleterious environmental impact. Such works, along with the declining economy, have helped victory gardens sprout and farmers' markets grow across the country. In 2007, Oxford American Dictionary named "locavore" its word of the year.

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King's movie is a series of vignettes on subjects such as school lunches in New York, the challenges of a family with an autistic child and how difficult it is to eat healthfully for families near or below the poverty line. In addition to cameos from some of Boulder's natural foods royalty, the film includes heavy hitters in the food activism world such as Mary Max, wife of artist Peter Max, who has been active in the New York Coalition for Healthy School Food and Tara Guber, who has raised millions to encourage healthy practices in the Los Angeles school system. A former Coca-Cola marketing senior vice president, Pierre Ferrari, talks about his awakening about the destructive impact of the soft drinks he was selling and his subsequent decision to quit the company.

King eventually hopes to use the film to take food awareness beyond the walls of natural foods stores and the stalls of farmers' markets to poorer neighborhoods where a fresh fruit or vegetable is as rare as a well-paying job.

"As a chef who's enthused about nourishing people, I saw there was a huge gap in the underserved community," King says. "Even if (residents) walked miles, there's no clean, healthy food."

King plans to use some of the proceeds from his film -- 20 percent will be donated to The Boulder School Food Project -- and the contacts he's made to fund "Whole Pantry," a pilot project that would open a store stocking natural foods in an underserved area of metro Denver. King envisions a commercial kitchen in the store to teach nearby residents how to cook fresh ingredients. He's been working with the Colorado Health Foundation, a nonprofit working to provide access to health care for the state's uninsured and underinsured, to connect to Colorado communities to get the project going. His eventual hope is to gain sponsors for the project and film a second documentary about Whole Pantry to serve as a template for similar projects in other areas of the country.

King got his inspiration for Whole Pantry from his work as a natural foods personal chef. He worked for five years in the home of Mike Gilliland and Libby Cook, co-founders of Wild Oats, and then for two years as a vegetarian personal chef to Demos, founder of White Wave, which pioneered the introduction of soy milk to the United States; Demos later co-founded NextFoods. During the same time period, King also worked doing pantry makeovers for clients who wanted to eat more healthfully.

"Most of the time, it would be for an affluent family," he says.

During one makeover, King ended up taking away about 90 percent of the pantry contents in his car.

"(My car) was loaded with all this stuff. (I thought) 'What do I do with it?'" he says. "I didn't want to throw it away, but I didn't think anyone should eat it."

King ended up taking it to the food pantry at the Emergency Family Assistance Association in Boulder. The fundamental injustice of the food system hit him -- essentially that the purest, most natural food was more expensive and less accessible.

"Food banks are there for people desperate for nourishment," he says. "People really in need of nourishment should get it. (They should) not just get the leftovers other people don't want."

A woman at EFAA, who later worked in Denver, helped King find a Denver-area family that he profiled in "Here We Grow," in a segment sponsored by Whole Foods, on how to buy natural foods on a budget. King began working on the film while serving as a personal chef, but quit two years ago to work on the movie full time.

Ben Friedland, regional marketing coordinator for Whole Foods, says the film was a natural for distribution by the company.

"We just fell in love with the message and the idea of the movie," Friedland says. "Here was a local chef trying to not only shed light on the current situation of eating in our country, but proposing solutions as well. He's working hard to debunk the myth that you have to spend a lot of money to eat healthy."

But can such a movie make a difference beyond the fit and healthy Boulder bubble and similar zip codes?

Boulder author Robyn O'Brien, who appears briefly in the film, says the food disconnect is not just in impoverished inner cities. After she wrote, "The Unhealthy Truth," a book about GMO crops and food allergies, she received an e-mail from the wife of a Nebraska farmer who plants almost all GMO crops. The woman, who has Stage IV breast cancer, decided to change the family's diet to natural grains, fruits and vegetables and grass fed meats, even as her husband continues to feed the industrial food chain.

"The conflict in her story is so poignant," O'Brien says.

She sees "Here We Grow" as an example of the effort every person who cares about the country's food system should be making to change it.

"It's all hands on deck," she says. "We can all do our part, whether at school , at work ... or as a film producer."

Demos, who also has not yet seen the film, says Craig has long been interested in the larger picture of the agricultural system.

"He's always been very passionate ... about food and where on the food chain we find ourselves."

Whether King can take his passion and move beyond raising awareness is something that still has to be has to be worked out, Demos says.

"He does have the passion. He does have the vision."

As for the film's message, not surprisingly, Demos says he very much supports it.

"Sound nutrition, environmental stewardship and social responsibility. Raise your hand if you want to vote against that."

To find out more about the movie, visit www.herewegrowmovie.com. Contact Cindy Sutter at sutterc@dailycamera.com or 303-473-1335

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